Through his experiments, he cleverly transformed his provinciality into a philosophical asset. True, he lived on the far edge of the British empire, but that meant he was able to give “an Account of American Electricity.” Just as stones fell in Europe and America alike, so “it is now discovered and demonstrated, both here and in Europe, that the Electrical Fire is a real Element, or Species of Matter, not created by the Friction [of the generator], but collected only.”97
Franklin knew he was doing something unprecedented. Midway through the seminal electrical experiments of 1747 and 1748, he retired from his printing business. He now had considerable assets, including his house and printshop. A private business would still make him money, but he no longer needed it. And the business took up time, made him seem more like a worker than a philosopher, and raised the question of whether he might force into print philosophical ideas that no one else would publish. So on January 1, 1748, Franklin and David Hall, who had progressed from being Franklin’s journeyman to his foreman, signed “Articles of Agreement.” The document made them partners, each receiving a share of the printing business’s income, but Hall would thenceforth be the active partner. (The friendship between the two men was clear in the statement that “the said Benjamin and David” entered a new business connection.) Not until he set up a press in France in 1779 would Franklin again have a printshop of his own.98
Yet having given up working with his hands, Franklin showcased their value in his experiments. His hands and fingers became electrical equipment. Because of the stigma of manual labor, the hand was still a complicated body part. Even quite rarified manual tasks were considered rather low. (One splendid snob dismissed musical talents in this way: “Those Embellishments are more noble and rich that lie in the Brain, than those that sink into the Feet, or perch on the Finger’s End.”) Amateur status in the sciences distinguished gentlemen from those who generated income by use of their hands.99
Hands were nevertheless acquiring dignity within the sciences. Experimenters grew accustomed to manipulating things. They even regarded their hands (and bodies) as sensitive indicators of whatever phenomena interested them. In doing so, they knew that their actions made them resemble artisans and manual laborers, who were referred to as “hands.” (In his first substantial letter to Collinson, Franklin had punned that “many Hands” on both sides of the Atlantic were busy with electrical experiments.) Like Freemasons, experimenters emulated skilled laborers without eliding any social boundaries between workers and men of science. For a former “leather apron” to do this took some nerve—and newfound confidence—both of which Franklin, now retired from his printshop, had in abundance.100
In one of his longest letters on electricity, he referred many times to the necessity of actually touching various mechanisms in order to detect an electrical current or to redirect it. Electricity could be drawn out of a “Bottle” (Leyden jar) “by touching the Wire” protruding from its top. Another electrical device would emit a charge at a distance up to two inches, “a pretty hard Stroke, so as to make one’s Knuckle ache.” Franklin loaned the rest of his body to science when he filled a glass vial with a “Purgative” (laxative or emetic), charged it up, then “took repeated Shocks from it” to see if the purgative effect would pass electrically into his body. It did not. Franklin had to content himself with feeling electrical currents wash through his body and with surviving an electrical “Blow” that briefly knocked him out while he was trying to electrocute a turkey—Thomas Tryon’s revenge?101
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Franklin began his experiments indoors and then took them outside, to the greater natural world. This was the case for his two first experiments, both of which began in a room and then moved out into the larger atmosphere; thus with heat, so with electricity.
He pursued the electric fluid outdoors. In an early 1749 letter to John Mitchell, on “a new Hypothesis for explaining the several Phaenomena of Thunder Gusts,” Franklin explored the atmospheric behaviors of electricity, air, and water, both fresh and salt. He analyzed these forms of matter as particulate and as differently disposed to electricity. Electricity “loves Water” and so was attracted to it; air was itself electric, so it was less attractive. But when water was electrified, it rose into the air in the form of clouds. Not all clouds were equally charged, however, and Franklin thought those arising from saltwater tended to be more so than freshwater clouds.102
If these clouds encountered something less electrified, such as a mountain range, the obstacle would draw down the water as rain and the electricity as lightning and thunder. Franklin used as an example the storms along the eastern Andes, which intercepted “all the Clouds brought against them from the Atlantic Ocean, by the Trade Winds.” (He had probably learned about the Andes from La Condamine, who had written about smallpox among Indians in Peru.) Like mountains, clouds formed from freshwater would draw electricity, again with thunder and lightning. “If the foregoing Hypothesis be a true one,” he wrote, “there ought to be but little Thunder and Lightning far at Sea.”103
Note, within this brief explanation, Franklin’s accumulated interests: particles, electricity, an atmosphere, circulation of air, Atlantic storms. There was as yet no clear explanation of the behavior of electricity up in the earth’s atmosphere—whoever could provide one would make a signal contribution to philosophy by revealing that electrical matter did seem to pervade all of creation. Franklin would be the one to make this contribution in experiments that represented the culmination of his reading and investigation into physical circulation.
On the same day he wrote to Mitchell, Franklin wrote Collinson that the Philadelphia electricians had celebrated their labors with a picnic on the Schuylkill River. The frolic marked a seasonal end to electrical investigations, with “hot Weather” making indoor experimentation “not so agreable.” The party arrived on the riverbank with plenty of provisions—and equipment. Using electricity, they killed and roasted a turkey and then ate it while enjoying wine in “Electrified Bumpers” that tickled the lips of the quaffer, “if the Party be close shaved, and does not breathe on the Liquor.” For many people, all this would have been fun enough. But those irrepressible pranksters could not resist running some electricity through the river in order to ignite, with a dramatic flash, some spirits of alcohol on the opposite bank.104
It was a lovely flourish, that trans-Schuylkill flash. It summed up so many of Franklin’s interests in physical circulation. And it symbolized the letter that recorded it, an over-the-water salute to Collinson, distant patron of the experiments that had taught Franklin’s circle how to send fire through water. The picnic also embodied the Philadelphians’ claim to universal knowledge: they brought their indoor activities out into the larger world. Indeed, given that he wrote to Mitchell about the “Phaenomena of Thunder Gusts” on the same April day that he wrote Collinson about the picnic, we can imagine Franklin looking to the skies during the frolic. The weather and the electricity were linked in his mind, just as he and other Philadelphians braced themselves for the muggy season of thunder and lightning.
Chapter 5
THE FRANKLIN PARADOX
TWO MONTHS LATER, it was too hot to picnic. On June 18, 1749, the temperature in Philadelphia reached “100 in the shade.” Some mad dogs and English settlers may have gone out in the noonday sun, but Franklin stayed home. “I sat in my chamber without exercise, only reading or writing,” he later wrote a friend, recalling that he stripped down to “a shirt, and a pair of long linen drawers.” He was still too warm. “The windows [were] all open, and a brisk wind blowing through the house, the sweat ran off the backs of my hands, and my shirt was often so wet, as to induce me to call for dry ones to put on.”1
Franklin’s recollection of the sweltering summer of 1749, which he related almost nine years later, registered physical discomfort and an almost unbearable tension between action and inaction. As he sat sweating in his underwear, he was waiting for something to happen.
It finally did
: the two letters he had written to Mitchell and Collinson on April 29, 1749, would that autumn be the first of his two read at the Royal Society of London. At forty-three, Franklin had his long-awaited metropolitan audience. Then the letters, along with most of the others he had written to Collinson, were published, first in London and then in France. Celebrity of every kind followed. In the period between 1749 and 1757 (when he reentered London as a recognized “genius”), Franklin achieved fame as a natural philosopher. He joined the international republic of letters—and immediately became its most important British colonial member. Through his prowess in natural philosophy, he came to exemplify universal knowledge. And the fact that a colonist of obscure birth could ascend to this status lent credibility to the idea that nearly anyone could comprehend the new science.
As he was proclaimed a philosopher and genius, Franklin plunged into politics. “I shall never ask, never refuse, nor ever resign an Office,” he promised, a good way to ensure he would be busy, too busy for the experimental science that had made his political authority possible. It was the Franklin paradox: his fame made him unable to continue working in the area that had made him famous. Instead, many of Franklin’s subsequent interests in the sciences—cartography, hydrography (the science of bodies of water, an ancestor of oceanography), and political arithmetic—did double duty in the political realm. At the time, politics meant empire, and all of Franklin’s new interests in science had imperial implications. They helped to determine which places the British would rule and which people would benefit from that rule. These were no small questions as North America headed into the cataclysmic Seven Years’ War, the most important geopolitical event of Franklin’s lifetime.2
HAVING his letters read at the Royal Society gave Franklin his first notable publicity, yet his initial statement on electricity and meteorology had appeared slightly earlier, in a surprising (and still overlooked) place—Lewis Evans’s 1749 Map of Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and the Three Delaware Counties. Why a map—and why this map?
Cartography was yet another of the eighteenth century’s momentous contributions to modern science. We now unfold maps confident that they accurately represent physical places. But it was only during Franklin’s lifetime that maps were so defined, as direct representations of what the eye supposedly sees when it scans the earth. So powerful was this new vision that mapping became a metaphor for a thorough survey of anything. Ephraim Chambers had called his Cyclopedia “a map of knowledge”; Diderot and d’Alembert claimed their Encyclopédie was “a kind of world map.” And actual maps were now the product of surveys that measured space on the earth and then transcribed it on paper. Surveyors used triangulation to determine positions among three visible objects, then another three, and so on, in order to generate a topographical field in which the distances among places were proportionate to their placement on the land itself. Sometimes, the surveys addressed more abstract questions; the field of geodesy, for instance, determined the size and shape of the earth.3
Pennsylvania as center of empire. Lewis Evans, Map of Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and the Three Delaware Counties (1749). HARVARD MAP COLLECTION.
The idea of measuring the world emerged in an age of wild imperial competition. Maps attempted to provide order amid the chaos. Cartography was the offspring of a complicated marriage of science and politics. People proclaimed the sciences to be universal, above nation and party, but they then embedded them within political concerns—and quarreled over the way to do so. A single map or other representation of nature could easily do all three things, that is, make a universal claim, score a partisan point, and deplore someone else’s partisan point.
The globe was a contested place; maps recorded the contests and were also weapons used in them. Europeans could not even agree on a prime meridian, a zero point from which a cartographer could calculate longitude, or east-west positions. (Latitude was easier—since antiquity, the equator had been the zero point.) Until the nineteenth century, when Europeans accepted a prime meridian at Greenwich, England, that point could be—and was—placed anywhere. In the meantime, European powers were essentially mapping their quarrels with each other, as when they put the prime meridian through their capitals. Even as they did so, they agreed that their surveys could claim non-European land for their empires, appropriating or erasing non-European views of territory as well as the territory itself.4
The globe we would recognize, one of fixed units of measurement and clearly demarcated zones, was nevertheless coming into view. Cartographers began to use the words continent and ocean to describe discrete masses of land and water; they linked the terms to proper names, such as Asia or Atlantic. They mapped the globe’s physical traits (as with magnetic or barometric variation) in order to visualize patterns within nature. And they took a new interest in precise, fixed national boundaries, at a time when wars over these borders shed enough blood to stain all eighteenth-century maps crimson.5
These were grand imperial goals, but colonists had their own and distinctive view of what maps should accomplish. They identified themselves in a middle position between high imperial strategy and practical local needs—and they definitely inscribed those needs on their maps. By the 1740s, Franklin and other Pennsylvanians worried that their colony’s original borders, which William Penn had carefully negotiated with the Delaware Indians, were too restrictive. The colonists wanted to expand outward, which was bound to bring them into conflict with Native Americans and with French settlers farther west. Since 1689, conflict between France and Britain had been escalating—war was an almost routine occurrence in the colonies, as Franklin had acknowledged at least since he had published Plain Truth.
Franklin also knew very well that maps played a significant role in the politics of empire. In 1746, he ordered, for the Pennsylvania Assembly, two sets of Henry Popple’s A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto (1733). He also wanted “some other large Map of the whole World” of equal size to Popple’s, “they being to be hung, one on each side the Door in the Assembly Room” so the assemblymen could see the whole world, see Pennsylvania’s place in it, and see its borders with its French and Spanish competitors.6
Lewis Evans, a Welsh-born draftsman and surveyor, shrewdly judged this a good moment to produce a regional map locally. Evans had gone to Franklin’s shop in 1736 to buy a copy of Edward Cocker’s Arithmetick (the same book Franklin had studied as an adolescent), and somehow, he became a clerk in the shop. Gradually, the two men became collaborators and friends; Deborah Franklin was godmother to Evans’s daughter, Amelia. Evans had executed one of the diagrams for Franklin’s 1744 pamphlet on the Pennsylvania fireplace and copied all of Franklin’s reports on electricity to make a 155-page manuscript for James Bowdoin of Massachusetts, who was fast becoming one of Franklin’s most important American correspondents by the end of the 1740s. Franklin also sold Evans books on mathematics and surveying, which helped him prepare for his survey of the middle colonies.7
To make his survey, Evans joined a 1743 expedition that also included John Bartram and Conrad Weiser, the colony’s main contact with Indians. Bartram quietly botanized; Weiser negotiated with Algonquian- and Iroquoian-speaking natives. Evans had the shadiest task: measuring Indian land without telling its owners what he was doing. He would use his survey to claim for Pennsylvania land that was disputed among colonial officials, Indian traders, and the Indians themselves. (This encroachment was particularly unfair to the Delaware, who had recently been cheated out of a vast expanse of territory in the so-called Walking Purchase. The Delaware had agreed to cede land but only to the extent that a man could walk in a day; the Pennsylvanians arranged men to cover ground in relay to guarantee that the “man” and the “walk” would yield the greatest amount of territory.) Native Americans knew all too well that colonists had designs on their land, so how Weiser explained Evans’s surveying instruments to them is anyone’s guess.8
Putting elec
tricity on the map. Close-up of Evans’s map (top left corner). HARVARD MAP COLLECTION.
It took six years for Evans to map the results of his survey, during which Franklin advised him about its preparation. David Hall, who ran Franklin’s printshop after 1748, probably produced the map, using an engraving by Lawrence Hebert. The final product presented the three colonies of the mid-Atlantic, plus part of Delaware; it also indicated waterways and mountains as, respectively, conduits and barriers for anyone pushing westward. Above all, the map implied a potential British control over territory extending hundreds of miles inland. Evans used both British and colonial measures to stake his claims. He provided two readings of longitude: on the very bottom of the map, he indicated longitude as drawn from London (in defiance of French territorial claims), and on the top, he indicated it as drawn from the State House in Philadelphia. Franklin’s hope that Philadelphia might become the center of the American colonies was now rendered on paper.9
Evans then added to his map a philosophical flourish, courtesy of Franklin. The left-hand side of the map offered a compressed version of Franklin’s explanation of Atlantic storms, which he had sketched at the end of his electrical experiments. The text noted the prevailing northeast direction of the storms, asserted the presence of electricity in the “Sea Clouds” that collided with “Land Clouds” to create lightning and thunder (thus restoring the “Equilibrium”), and depicted the general directions of winds along the Atlantic coast. Franklin’s first statement on electricity was also his first venture into cartography—early evidence that he thought about science and empire together. Yet if Franklin had wanted to begin contributing to printed works that would survive longer than almanacs, maps were an odd choice. The Evans map was not produced in very large quantities, and it was made to be used. In consequence, surviving copies are now rare and not in the best condition.10
The First Scientific American Page 15